Saturday, 20 June 2009

The latest of my obsessions is Twitter Widgets. I discovered them (in a tweet) about a week ago and had to have one, and then more, one for each of my sites. There is so much discussion out there on how to use Twitter effectively for teaching and learning and I am just beginning to get it. I have placed a widget in the different sites for library and class announcements, which I realise is not very collaborative at all, but valuable all the same. Ways in which I can see myself using Twitter as a teaching tool is for class dicussions, brain storming and data collection. I am toying with the idea of signing my kids up next August. My biggest concern is that most of my students have so many accounts for online applications already. Dare I suggest they sign up for yet another one? I will of course, and our head of Ict has promised to look into a solution that would allow them to log in simoultaniously to all their accounts, but this may be a while coming.

Monday, 15 June 2009

Mind42 is a powerful mind mapping application which allows you to add hyperlinks and attachments to your maps. These can then be exported, and shared with others. Collaboration is central to this app, which makes it a great choice for group work. You can invite collaborators to work with you on your maps, which if used carefully will also aid in building a resource bank directly on the map. As a bit of a bonus, Google chat and Google talk can also be enabled, so that group members can discuss their work in real time.

Sunday, 14 June 2009

I am definately going to use Simplybox more than ever now, to box and share my online finds. I no longer have to box and bookmark on Delicious separately. I can now Simplybox items and the bookmark is saved on my Delicious account and get this-it is also automatically posted on Twitter too, (Keeping up with tweets is one of my goals this year). Great stuff!

Saturday, 13 June 2009

Create movie posters, magazine covers, maps, jigsaws and more using Big Huge Labs (the home of Flickr toys) . Just sign up for free and begin creating. You can save your masterpieces to the computer or order prints online. I had a play with this and created a poster and a magazine cover. I didn't like my poster much, but kept the mag cover as it turned out alright. What a great way to generate display material and highlight you pictures. You can even save your work to flickr

Saturday, 6 June 2009

Here are a couple of related sites which house Second Life videos for educators. I think this is a great idea. I hope that as the idea catches on, and teachers become more familiar with Second Life, the variety of vids available will increase.